Archive for June, 2014

The proposed budget for the federal Environmental Protection Agency for fiscal year 2015 is $7.89 billion. That should be plenty of money for the EPA to colonize more of American life. As Keith Matheny notes in the Lansing State Journal, the EPA is advancing new regulations that will make life more difficult for farmers....Read More »

We have noted that California’s Parks Department protected its budget by hiding more than $50 million in a secret fund, at a time when it was shutting down parks and giving government employees lucrative vacation payouts. Now, in “California State Departments Play Shell Game,” Jon Ortiz and Jim Miller of the Sacramento Bee have...Read More »

Count this among the dubious milestones of government achievement: Through the end of 2012, the Federal Register, the ever-growing compendium of the federal government’s regulations, now includes over one million instances of words — such as “shall,” “must,” and “required”—whose only reason for being is to restrict the economic activities in which Americans might otherwise...Read More »

For some months now the story has been going around that California is experiencing an economic turnaround. As Ben Boychuk noted in City Journal California, the story “describes a state emerging from a decade of fiscal darkness to reclaim its place as an innovative, diverse, entrepreneurial haven.” The tale may be compelling but remains...Read More »

The new eastern span of the Bay Bridge cost $6.4 billion, $5 billion more than the original estimate, and came in ten years late. Despite the long delay serious safety issues remain. These prompted Caltrans geologist Michael Moore to call for a “criminal investigation,” but that never took place. Instead state senator Mark De...Read More »

Last summer, on July 8, 2013, President Obama reported on how well his initiative to use technology, and specifically, information technology, to improve the performance of federal government agencies was coming along. Let’s flash forward to May 28, 2014, nearly a year later, to a little noticed GAO report that documents how effectively the...Read More »